Shirley Martin had what nowadays we might call a parasocial relationship with John F. Kennedy. An Oklahoma housewife and a mother of four, she loved the first Catholic President so much that she converted to Catholicism. She also had his bust atop her television set, a replica of his rocking chair in her living room, and a pet bird named PT-109, in honor of the boat that the young Kennedy had heroically commanded in the Second World War. But it was only after J.F.K. died that Martin became something approaching a character in his life, or, rather, in his sprawling and bottomless afterlife.

Following the President’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Martin flung herself into investigating the crime and getting to know some of those closest to it—specifically those who suspected, as she did, that the assailant of record, Lee Harvey Oswald, may have been innocent. In Martin’s view, there was something too rushed and pat about how the assassination had been pinned on a feckless young (supposed) Marxist who was then (rather conveniently) shot dead on national television. Martin called and wrote, repetitively, to newspapers, reporters, members of the Warren Commission, and the F.B.I. with tips and thoughts. She developed telephone friendships with other amateur gumshoes and with Oswald’s mother, and sent money to Oswald’s widow. She also sent funds—and, later, stacks of her research—to Mark Lane, the attorney who testified on Oswald’s behalf before the Warren Commission and who published multiple books challenging its judgment that Oswald and his assassin, Jack Ruby, each acted alone.

Often, Martin would pile into her station wagon with various kids (and occasionally her husband) to make the roughly three-hundred-mile drive to Dallas, where they mapped out Oswald’s alleged movements on the day of the assassination and tracked down scores of sources. Each of the Martin children played his or her part: “Teresa read all the newspapers, and the boys, Mike and Steve, cut the stories out and examined the photographs,” Kaitlyn Tiffany writes in her captivating and impressively researched new book, “The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery.” Martin’s eldest child, the teen-aged Vickie, who interviewed sources and transcribed the recordings, “was a full partner in the investigation,” Tiffany explains. “Whenever Shirley had a hard time getting somebody to talk or to let them into a building they wanted to see, she would say that Vickie was working on a children’s book about the assassination (for some reason, this often worked).”

Martin soon found other women who were evangelically devoted to the belief that powerful and obscure forces had suppressed the full story of Kennedy’s assassination, including Sylvia Meagher, the World Health Organization employee who created an index to more than sixteen thousand pages of evidence for the Warren Commission report, and Maggie Field, a financier’s wife in Beverly Hills. Unsurprisingly, journalists and government officials of a status-quo mind-set found these women to be annoying or dangerous, or both. In April, 1964, J. Edgar Hoover complained in an internal memo about Martin’s “insulting, argumentative and antagonistic attitude toward the FBI.” But demanding accountability from democratic institutions is hardly the stuff of treason—or at least it wasn’t perceived as such back then—and so it was difficult for Hoover or his loyalists to portray these hobbyist detectives as subversives or anti-American, per se. There needed to be another box to put them in. And soon enough, there was.

In the mid-sixties, the “pop cultural trope of the desperate and deluded conspiracy theorist had not yet formed,” Tiffany writes. “There were no familiar images, like that of a man in his mother’s basement or a corkboard covered in red string.” But, in 1967, the journalists Richard Warren Lewis and Lawrence Schiller published the book “The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report,” which portrayed Martin and her ilk as lonely, maladjusted, and pitiable—little more than cult members, really, with Lane as their wild-eyed ringleader and the martyred J.F.K. as their godhead. It was “Scavengers,” Tiffany observes, that “helped to create the conspiracy theorist and to put her in her place—she was a bored woman with too much time on her hands, an unhealthy fixation on something she didn’t understand, a childlike fascination with scissors and glue and pictures of John F. Kennedy.” According to this highly gendered stereotype, such women were not seeking truth, but merely “looking for meaning to fill their empty lives,” as the historian Kathryn Olmsted put it, in her criticism of “Scavengers.”

Of course, there can be kernels of truth in crude stereotypes; of course, we are all in search of meaning in our lives. Martin is quoted at great length in “Scavengers,” given enough rope that she comes off as a narcissistic kook; at one point, she boasts that “out of all the drippy women in Tulsa who are housewives, and all the boring people who exist in this city, I was the only one who did go down” to Dallas. Yet, in a testament both to her self-awareness and to the strength of her convictions, Martin wasn’t terribly rattled by the publication of “Scavengers,” albeit for reasons she couldn’t quite articulate. Tiffany reports that the intrepid young Vickie, Martin’s firstborn and co-investigator, had a ready explanation for her mother’s surprising equanimity in the face of public scorn. “It’s because you are one of a group,” she told her mom. “You don’t feel lonesome.”

It is generally understood today, as it was not understood sixty-plus years ago, that those who subscribe to conspiracy theories tend to do so in order to make sense of an unstable reality, to feel a modicum of stability and control, and to find a sense of belonging in a group. A paper published by two Yale researchers, in 2023, noted that a person’s inclination toward “conspiracy theorizing” doesn’t appear to correlate with having weaker social networks; his or her pet theories can act as a “sacred canopy,” the authors write, which is an “assumed shared belief structure that conveys support, emotional benefits, and protection against dissonance and disagreement.” Though conspiratorial thinking itself doesn’t necessarily have an isolating effect on an individual, isolation might enhance the allure of conspiracy: studies from 2017 and 2020 found a link between social ostracism and the likelihood of endorsing conspiratorial beliefs.

Our contemporary understanding of conspiracy theorists is heavily influenced by the experience of the coronavirus pandemic, a mass trauma in which fear, confusion, and enforced isolation added fuel to paranoiac phenomena such as QAnon and anti-vaccine extremism. The so-called scavengers’ resistance to government narratives in the nineteen-sixties, it must be said, bears little resemblance to these more recent strains of hysteria. What Martin and her fellow-gumshoes did took vastly more effort, for one thing—the 2026 analogue to “driving six hours to Dallas” is “going on Reddit”—and their project was vastly more evidence-based. Dissidents like Martin were correct that the Warren Commission was disingenuously oriented toward a foregone conclusion, they were correct about the mishandling and suppression of evidence, and they were correct to be obsessed with the florid bizarreness of Lee Harvey Oswald’s final few years on this planet in a manner that the Warren Commission was not. The skeptics were also frequently prescient in their observations, as when Martin remarks, as quoted in “Scavengers,” that, “if some of us don’t work as hard as we can, the same thing might happen again in another city, with Robert Kennedy the victim this time.”

But, in some ways, Martin was a preview of today’s post-COVID, stay-at-home “conspiracy mom” or of the MAHA moms—the foot soldiers of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s vaccine-skeptical Make America Healthy Again movement. This stripe of activist, like Martin, is often a woman who distrusts public institutions and who longs for community even as she shrinks from it (and who is irresistibly drawn to one Kennedy or another). More than a decade into her marriage, after her husband relocated the family from Honolulu to small-town Oklahoma, Martin struggled to make friends; she also adjudged the local school to be “god-awful,” Tiffany writes, and so she—like many a prominent MAHA mom—opted to homeschool, a decision that likely intensified her isolation. She had no formal career prospects; she had married at age nineteen and had had her first child a year later. The Kennedy assassination all at once gave Martin a vocation and a network of pen pals and phone buddies; her monomania also provided her kids with an opportunity for experiential learning in a pre-digital era. And Martin certainly “did her own research,” just as R.F.K., Jr., tells his MAHA followers to do today.

Yet, though Martin adhered closely to this type in so many respects, she did finally break from it, and at a moment of extreme vulnerability and despair, as Tiffany writes in the most affecting passage of “The Housewives Underground.” In September, 1967, Martin’s daughter Vickie—her partner in crime-solving—and a friend of Vickie’s were seriously injured in a car crash in Tulsa. The following day, the friend died, apparently of fat embolism syndrome, an unusual complication of breaking a bone that isn’t typically fatal. Then Vickie, age twenty-two, died of the same complication. Some months before the accident, according to Tiffany, Martin had received a letter, written in German and sent from Italy, which warned that her probes of the Kennedy assassination may be putting her children in danger.

A scenario in which two young and healthy women survive an auto accident and then die days apart of the same rare condition might be enough to transform any mother, crazed with grief, into a full-blown paranoid conspiracy theorist—to say nothing of a mother whose freelance sleuthing had attracted the ire of the notoriously spiteful director of the F.B.I. and admonishments from mysterious foreign correspondents. (R.F.K., Jr., in fact, has spoken extensively about his belief that the C.I.A. plotted to assassinate his uncle and his father, and how that belief has shaped his conspiratorial mind-set.)

But Shirley Martin did not take that turn. She did briefly entertain the notion that Vickie might have been the victim of a murder plot. And then, by some unknown permutation of temperament, chance, and electrochemical impulse, she let the idea go. “It was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, and it could have happened to anyone just the same way,” Tiffany writes. “There had been no reason for it.” We are all of us looking for meaning to fill our empty lives, and it takes heartbreaking courage to admit when there’s none to be found. ♦